Forum:Alternate timelines and Star Trek (2009)
Thanks to the Star Trek (2009) film, I don’t understand anything. In the past, things used to be much easier: there was a timeline, and the timeline could be changed by time travel. That means, if someone traveled back in time and changed something, the Federation traveled back as well and preserved/restored the timeline. In some of the series, there are even temporal agents from the distant future whose only task is to prevent anyone from changing the timeline. The latest film, however, changes this concept completely. And that’s not bad at all because it uses a new concept that is more logic and actually supported by real scientists. But it has a huge impact on the Star Trek franchise. I just want to talk about a movie, let’s say Star Trek VIII. What does the new concept mean for the movie? It means: when the Borg traveled back in time and the Enterprise followed them, the timeline was split into two branches. In one of the branches, the Borg and the Enterprise disappeared and nothing happened. In the other branch, both ships landed in the past. There, the events as we know them from the movie occurred. Finally, the Enterprise traveled back to the future. But to what future did they travel back? Or let's talk about the series. Kirk and Spock, f.ex., prevent Bones from helping Edith Keeler. But why? The time branch where he saves her which leads to Hitler’s victory actually still exists and is not eradicated according to the new concept. What is the task of the temporal agents from the 29th and 31st century if they actually can’t prevent anything as every change of the past necessarily leads to an alternate timeline that will exist forever. And the prevention of the event would even cause another timeline instead of fixing it, like the Keeler example (one timeline where nothing happened, another timeline where Bones saves Keeler and Hitler wins the war, and a third timeline where Spock and Kirk prevent Bones from saving Keeler). Everything gets quite meaningless, doesn’t it? Why am I writing this comment? I’d like to know whether there already are good explanations concerning the impact of this new assumption on the Star Trek series? -- AniWX 15:15, June 4, 2012 (UTC) :In a non-canon aspect, the Department of Temporal Investigations series of novels covers this quite well. In a canon sense? See Alternate timeline, alternate reality. -- sulfur 15:48, June 4, 2012 (UTC) ::If it would depend on me, I'd delete both the Abrams movie and from canon completely. -- Ltarex 18:43, June 4, 2012 (CET) :::"I'd delete both the Abrams movie and from canon completely" :::first it's thankfully not up to you, Enterprise is part of both the Prime universe and JJ'Verse :::other then the last episode of the show was good, and did not break any issues with TNG, DS9, or VOY, if anything TOS is the odd show out, the other shows had the same people running things, they did their best to match things up with TOS, if you think should be de-cannonized then all of the current shows should be as well. 20:22, August 25, 2012 (UTC) ::::My apologies for commenting on something that was posted so long ago; although according to the main forum, there was more recent activity or posting. ::::I think a key here is that, in the 2009 movie, the characters only speculate about the "many worlds theory" - invariably this was the writers' attempt to explain away overwriting all of the past Star Trek history and canon, but ultimately all it is, from a character or story perspective, is speculation. They offer no proof of this; and given other established examples in Star Trek where causality is definitively in effect, that would be proof that their speculation was simply wrong. ::::The question then becomes, why didn't the older Spock try to set things right, when he himself has dealt with time travel on a few separate occasions. My own speculation - and it is only that - that Older-Spock came to realize, through some means of deduction, that he in fact originated from some divergent timeline - one, perhaps, similar to the timeline that preceded it, yet distinctly different from what any original or "stable" timeline was supposed to be. So any attempts to restore his own aberrant timeline could undermine efforts to restore history to its proper definition.--Stargazer1682 (talk) 17:13, October 17, 2019 (UTC) :::::Leaving aside the question of whether one timeline or the other is "right", I don’t think we can definitively say that the characters were mistaken in their interpretation. It’s certainly clear that, at least from an extra-diegetic viewpoint, both timelines have continued to exist: we’ve seen narratives set in 2258 in both timelines. Now, it’s only a narrative convention, but in the "old way" of stories with time travel and altered histories, once the timeline is altered we (the audience) don’t get to see the pre-alteration timeline again, unless it’s "fixed". (For example, there are no scenes cutting back to Scotty on the Enterprise while Kirk and Spock are in the 1930s in ; and as soon as the Enterprise-C emerges from the rift in , we don’t see the "regular universe" until it goes back to meet its destiny.) :::::If we can take this narrative structure as evidence — that is, that if we see events in a given timeline after a temporal alteration has occurred, then that timeline must continue to exist — then clearly, the Kelvin timeline and Prime timeline both exist, and for at least the case of Nero’s timeline alterations, the many-worlds hypothesis holds. Now, we could hypothesize why the effects of changing history in this one case are so different from the effects in other Star Trek time-travel stories ("red matter!"), but really, any such "Watsonian" explanation is going to be arbitrary. :::::Ultimately, a viewer has the choice of either accepting that the mechanics of time travel and alternate timelines in the 2009 film is different from that shown in other stories, or believing that the only Star Trek stories that "really happened" are and the Kelvin movies. I know which I prefer. —Josiah Rowe (talk) 18:36, October 17, 2019 (UTC) :::::tl;dr version: if you try to apply one set of rules to all time-travel stories in Star Trek, you break it. Since time travel isn’t real, why not say that in some cases changing the past destroys the previously existing timeline (e.g. ), and in other cases the unaltered timeline continues to exist (e.g. )? —Josiah Rowe (talk) 18:43, October 17, 2019 (UTC)